I Have A Dream

 

This is a book we got for Hamony this Christmas.  I want teach her about what it means to be African American.  I want her to have a solid understanding of her cultural heritage.  I want her to feel a sense of pride in who she is and where she comes from.  This is challenging in our small town.  Harmony loves to read and loves to be read to.  We read every night at least one, usually more books.  I try to make sure she is exposed to stories about all different people and places.  Some of the books we have enjoyed are: The Junnie B. Jones series, Fancy Nancy books, The Anna Habiscus series, books about adoption, seek and find books, and so many other classic books.  These are all great and give us opportunites to talk about being us, dealing with different situations, what it means to be a family, how to look at differences, and God's unconditional love for all of us along with what his Word tells us about all of this and more.   These books are great, but it's time for us to start exploring the actual people and events in history that brought us to where we are today.  I want to focus on historical people and their contributions to changing our country.  I also want to focus on people who made a difference in a positive way who can act as role models for my daughter. 

I found this book about Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream speech", at Harmony's school book sale.  To be honest, I've heard bits and pieces of the speech, but have never heard the entire speech.  I have never really thought about what was happening at that time in our countries history and the profound message he was spreading for that time.  Every page of this book has large colorfull illustrations clearly offering a visual of Dr. King's vision.  All of the text are exerpts from Dr. King's speech.  At the end of the book is the word for word speech for parents.  The book also encludes a CD of Dr. King's speech in his voice. 

After reading this book, I realized that it's not enough for Harmony and I to just talk about accepting differences and loving her exactly as she is, and telling her she is beautiful inside and out.  It's time to start teaching her about her history, our history.  This book was a great starting point.  We read it together yesterday.  She likes when we take turns reading every other page.  It was moving to hear her reading the words of this amazing man.  It's a realativly short book, but we stopped along the way and taked about what the words meant, what really happened, and why Dr. King's work was so important.  One part of the speech states "I have a dream that one day the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners will sit together at the table of brotherhood".   Harmony struggled to understand the word slave.  I told her it was when person "buys" another person.  She smiled and said, "yeah, like how you bought me".  Ugh!  Not exactly.  We ended up spending a great amount of time on this.  It was a very hard concept for her to understand, which part of me is thankful for.  Yet it's also an important concept to understand in relation to her history.  We talked about this sensitive topic in a way a 7 year old could grasp.  I'm sure this discussion will lead to future discussions, actually I hope it will.  This has also presented an educational opportunity for our boys.  These discussion will help us all to grow together, and to have a better understanding of each other.  Although we are trying to teach Harmony about her history, I feel as though we are learning along with her.  This is just the beginning.  I'm going to start searching for books about other important African American people to learn about.